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the two observers have brought to light favours the views of the advocates of 
“ progressive development.” Mr. Laing considers that the theory which best 
meets the facts of the case is that the human type is that of men who migrated 
northwards while Britain was united to a southern continent, and while the 
severity of the glacial epoch was abating. That this race, whose skulls are 
occasionally found in caves, lived on for an indefinite period, until they were 
exterminated or enslaved by superior races in times approaching to the 
historical era, “ leaving, however, small fragments in remote and secluded 
situations, who preserved the primitive type and savage rudeness down to a 
period sufficiently modem to allow of their relics being occasionally dis- 
covered. The whole story would then be consistent — strangeness and extreme 
rudeness of weapons and implements would correspond with strangeness and 
extreme rudeness of human type.” The Caithness skull No. 1 is a singularly 
degraded one, being indeed far more animal than any European cranium 
which has yet been discovered in the prehistoric tumuli of the Iron, Bronze, 
or later Stone periods. If, in a well-formed European head a line be drawn 
vertically over the skull from ear to ear, half the brain will be found to lie in 
front of it ; but in this specimen not one-fourth of the cranial cavity lies in 
front of such a line. “ The degree of prognathism, as shown by the projection 
of the upper jaw and teeth, and the narrowness of the ape-like palate, is 
equal to that of the lowest specimens of the negro and Australian races.” In 
the Appendix Professor Huxley offers some remarks upon one of the state- 
ments made by Dr. Davis in a memoir read before the Anthropological 
Society. Dr. Davis seems to imagine that synostosis explains fully the con- 
formation of the Neanderthal skull. His views were very ably refuted by 
Dr. Thurnam, in an essay in the Natural History Review (a periodical now 
extinct) for April last. The arguments of Dr. Davis are critically examined 
by Professor Huxley, and are shown to be extremely distorted. The latter, 
in concluding his observations, says, “ Would it not have been worth Dr. 
Davis’s while (as he has read the paper from which he has done me the 
honour to quote a phrase) to have looked at No. 5,331 as well as at the gorilla 
skull in the College Museum, before he undertook to ‘ explain the Nean- 
derthal skull anatomically’ ? ” 
The “ Reliquse Aquitanicse,” or Contributions to the Archaeology and 
Palaeontology of Perigord and the adjoining provinces of Southern France, is 
Part I. of the joint work of M. Lartet and the late Mr. Henry Christy. It 
is published in quarto, is illustrated by a series of magnificent plates, and 
cannot fail, when completed, to be a most valuable addition to the literature 
of prehistoric palaeontology. Owing to the lamented death of the English 
author, the whole onus of preparing the forthcoming parts of the work has fallen 
upon M. Lartet, who, however, will be assisted by Professor Rupert J ones in the 
labour of editing. Of course a good deal of the scheme of, and material for, 
the treatise had been sketched out by Mr. Christy previous to his death. For 
example, he had arranged its style and mode of publication ; very many 
plates, too, had been drawn and lithographed in Paris under his super- 
intendence, and a general notice of the relationship between the stone im- 
plements found in the caves of Dordogne to the implements of existing 
savages and prehistoric ones, had been rearranged by him from his paper 
communicated to the Ethnological Journal. The present number contains 
